Metal and Magic: A Fantasy Journey

by Steve Windsor

  Tristan pressed his hair unhappily over his face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why don’t you tell us what you were arrested for, Rusty?” Leila suggested. “And what happened to your tooth?”

  Rusty poked his chipped front tooth with his tongue. “I’m turning into a vampire,” he said happily. “I’ll start sneaking around and drinking your blood in a couple of days.”

  Laughing, Tristan abandoned his pile of wilting plants and hurried to catch up with him and Leila. “You’re mental! What really happened?”

  Rusty’s smile vanished. “Don’t joke about that,” he said, his face somehow dangerous despite the scruffy hair.

  “Sorry,” Tristan said quickly. “But were you in a fight or something?”

  The threatening look on Rusty’s face passed as quickly as it had appeared. “I wish it was that exciting.” His grin was back. “Naw, some guy pushed me down the stairs when he heard I was leaving that godawful detention center in Texas.”

  “What were you there for?” Leila asked again. She paused at the entrance to the Lair, waiting for Eli and Trey to draw ahead of them. “What did you do?”

  Rusty shrugged. “Not much, as far as I can tell. I got wasted at some party and passed out, and when I woke up I was lying in the middle of some old field with beer cans all over. There was a barn and a farmhouse nearby, and they were both on fire.” Rusty shook his head and stuck a foot warily through the magical barrier. Once Tristan and Leila had joined him, he continued. “That’s when the police started showing up. No one believed me when I said I didn’t know what happened, so I got arrested for bloody arson.”

  This made Tristan feel guiltier than before. Leila and Rusty were probably assuming he’d been arrested on similar charges, not for something like manslaughter.

  Leila noticed his sudden frown. “What’s up with you?”

  “I’m just annoyed about Zeke,” he lied.

  “It’s not fair at all!” Rusty said, eagerly resuming the subject. “We should tell one of the teachers. Drakewell would have to do something about it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah, right,” Leila said. “Give it up, Rusty.”

  Everyone began settling in quickly enough. Tristan soon learned that the only thing the teachers gave out as readily as homework was punishment; the only student who spent more time working off hours than Zeke was Leila. Though it was easy enough to find enjoyable work to complete, the punishments cut into their already limited study time.

  After working off her first several hours of punishment in the kitchen, where she quickly took a liking to Gerard Quinsley, Leila never went to any other teacher. When Rusty asked her if she ever got bored of it, she said, “Gerry knows lots of good stories. Besides, I like cooking.”

  Tristan received his first hour of punishment later that first week, when he forgot Grindlethorn’s medicine assignment in the bunkroom and had to run back to grab it. He approached Merridy to work it off; to his dismay, she appeared just as anxious and unfriendly as usual. He found himself wishing he’d gone to Alldusk instead.

  “You could help grade these pre-tests, I suppose,” Merridy said distractedly when Tristan arrived in her office. She handed him a pile of quizzes from the day before. “As I said in class, they were merely intended to determine how I should structure the course.”

  Tristan took a seat in the corner of her tiny office, perched on a spindly chair. “Professor?” He smoothed his hair over his scars. “You haven’t given me an answer key.”

  Merridy sighed. “Sorry, Tristan.” She drew a page from her top drawer and handed it to him.

  Flipping through the stack of quizzes, Tristan found his own to grade first. The test had been complicated—Merridy had asked them about the geology of natural disasters; the movement of odd weather patterns; and the maintenance of fragile ecosystems. Tristan had done terribly. Unwilling to calculate his failing score, he merely made a slash through each incorrect answer.

  “Thank you so much for your help,” Merridy said an hour later, taking the finished papers from Tristan. “In the future, I would suggest finding another teacher to assist—I have quite a lot to deal with just now, and I cannot make time for this on a regular basis.”

  “Sorry, Professor,” Tristan said. Bobbing his head at her, he left.

  The following week, Tristan worked off hours with Professor Alldusk, helping bottle dried herbs and scrub accumulated soot from the walls of the chemistry classroom.

  After making a bad first impression on the students, Professor Drakewell seemed determined to intimidate and unnerve them still further. The headmaster had a disconcerting habit of roaming the halls of the Lair, appearing from the shadows where people least expected him and doling out punishments to any student who couldn’t come up with a good excuse for being there. Professor Drakewell was anything but stingy about giving out hours. By the end of the first week, everyone knew how Finley—surprisingly brilliant in class but slow at everything else—had blundered into Drakewell’s office and earned himself ten hours to work off.

  Tristan wasn’t about to tell Leila or Rusty this, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that Drakewell was watching him more carefully than anyone else. The headmaster ran across Tristan in the hallways more often than could be considered strictly accidental.

  If anything, though, Merridy seemed more frightened of Drakewell than any of the students were. On their second Monday of classes, Merridy’s sixth period class was interrupted by the sudden appearance of the headmaster in their midst.

  “Though the overall tides are governed by the moon,” Merridy was saying, “there are many smaller forces that can trigger much more dramatic phenomena. For instance, underwater earthquakes or tremors may lead to the formation of tsunamis, while the meeting of two separate currents will often create whirlpools or, on a larger scale, maelstroms. Whether we discuss—”

  Merridy broke off, eyes widening behind her glasses. Tristan turned in his seat to see what had scared her—Drakewell had materialized at the back of the room, sneering at Merridy from beside a pillar.

  “I hope I have not interrupted anything important,” he said mockingly. “Would you please join me in the hallway for a minute?” Drakewell tapped the black hourglass at his neck.

  Tristan could have sworn the headmaster had been invisible a moment ago—the pillar wasn’t wide enough nor the shadows deep enough to hide his tall form.

  Merridy opened her mouth and closed it again; with a nervous glance at the front row of students, she hurried towards the door. When Drakewell drew the classroom door shut, the room was left in utter silence. Tristan glanced at Leila, but she shook her head and put a finger to her lips. No one moved.

  Merridy returned a full ten minutes later, white-faced and flustered. “Where was I?” she said, glancing towards the door and fidgeting with a pile of notes on her desk.

  “What’s the matter, professor?” Zeke teased. “Can’t keep your eyes off Drakewell? Darla and...what’s his first name, anyway?”

  For that, Merridy gave him an hour of punishment.

  After class, Rusty was the first to jump up from his seat.

  “What’re up to?” Tristan said, elbowing Rusty.

  Rusty shrugged. “Just wondering where Drakewell had gone. There’s gotta be something he’s always doing, right? I mean, he’s never in his office, and he isn’t at dinner much either. So where does he keep hiding?”

  “Maybe he’s just invisible most of the time,” Tristan said shortly.

  “I doubt that,” Leila said, though she surely realized Tristan had been joking. “Maybe he has some job here that the other teachers are afraid to do. Remember what Gracewright said about magic? It doesn’t follow moral codes—maybe Drakewell is torturing people, or—”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Tristan interrupted. For the first time since the crash, he was almost happy. He didn’t want to ruin that by thinking about Drakewell.

  “I wonder what we’d be doing if we wer
e still home,” Rusty said one Thursday night two weeks after they’d arrived. No one was asleep yet, though the bunkroom lights had been extinguished. Leila often told stories once the lights were out, but tonight she was in the kitchen.

  “You mean if you were still locked up?” Tristan said darkly.

  “Whatever. I wasn’t in jail for long,” Rusty said. “I mean if we were really home. What would be happening right now?”

  Tristan bit his tongue, glad it was dark. “Nothing good,” he muttered.

  “Are you gonna tell us how you got those scars?” Rusty asked.

  “We all know your face is messed up,” said Eli from the next bunk over. “You don’t have to keep hiding it.”

  “Shut it,” Tristan snapped, throwing the covers over his head.

  “I’m glad we’re here,” Rusty said quickly, saving Tristan. “It’s all so exciting, don’t you think? Plus, I’m sure this is way more valuable than regular school.”

  “But what is this?” Eli said. “I don’t see the point of what we’re doing. Why study magic if we can’t use it?”

  “I’m sure we’ll get to that later,” Rusty insisted. “I bet—”

  “You know what we would be doing, if we were home?” Leila said from the doorway.

  Tristan pulled the covers off his head.

  “We would be starting our sophomore year of high school,” Leila said. “Everything would be the same—the history classes and math classes, the new textbooks and new teachers. But when you walk through those familiar hallways, you realize that everything has changed. The other students realize it, too—they notice your scars and your broken teeth. They avert their eyes, and they whisper behind your back. ‘That’s the criminal,’ they say. Even your friends ignore you. Did you ever have friends? Suddenly you can’t recall.”

  No one spoke. Leila tiptoed over to her bed; Tristan heard a soft rustling as she pulled on her pajamas in the dark.

  “You want to scream at them,” she whispered. “‘It was an accident!’ Instead you keep silent. There is nothing left for you but silence.”

  That night the nightmares were worse than usual.

  He dreamed he was attacking Marcus, flailing desperately at him, trying to break him. Everything was growing hazy, and his fists seemed to connect only with damp air. Finally the haze cleared, and Tristan looked down to see Marcus lying at his feet, his body crumpled. With a jolt, he wrenched himself away from the scene, though Marcus’s dead body wouldn’t fade.

  He was struggling to wake, chest slicked with sweat, when he felt Leila’s hand on his shoulder.

  Groaning, Tristan rolled over to look at her. “Was I shouting again?” he whispered.

  Leila nodded.

  With a sigh, Tristan closed his eyes. He heard a creak of bedsprings as Leila stepped down from Rusty’s bed.

  “Wait!” he whispered suddenly. “You have to see something.” There was something he needed to know, something that would assuage a small part of his fears.

  Leila waited for him at the foot of the ladder and followed him into the hallway.

  “What is it?”

  Tristan beckoned her forward. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light; then the hallway came alive with brilliant silver figures, bright as stars against the stone. If anything, the shifting silver designs were more vivid than ever.

  “Can you see that?” he asked, pointing at the figure of a bear splashing through a river.

  Leila looked at Tristan’s finger and then squinted at the wall. “It’s too dark. What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  Tristan’s hopes plummeted. “There. Do you see anything at all?” He traced his finger around the outline of the bear, from its perked ears to its shaggy hind feet. At least the shape didn’t appear to be moving.

  Now Leila was looking at Tristan instead of the wall. “It just looks like gray marble. Is there supposed to be anything special about it?”

  “Right,” Tristan said gloomily. “Forget about it.”

  Chapter 6: The Lemon Tree

  Before long they had settled into a routine, where auras and fire and golden orbs became commonplace. In the daytime, Tristan came to a point where he could accept magic to a certain extent, and the headaches ceased. At night, though, his inevitable madness was never far from his thoughts.

  The classes themselves were quickly becoming more exciting; while the other students grew more confident at seeing bottled magic, Tristan was already becoming adept at collecting magical vapors and recognizing the brightest auras in nature.

  Alldusk’s chemistry classes were the most entertaining by far. As Tristan had guessed, Professor Alldusk was generous, quick to smile, and—best of all—rarely gave punishments. He explained that although the strongest magic was often collected while burning the subtlest plants or minerals, colorful flames and explosions were useful as well.

  “This school is situated above a number of mineral deposits,” Alldusk said. “We therefore have ready access to any number of chemicals that would otherwise be too rare for everyday use in creating magical vapor.”

  One day Alldusk asked Tristan to stand by and help him bottle vapors while he proceeded to burn lithium chloride, copper sulfate, and a number of other chemicals. The resulting flames burned blue, red, green, and purple.

  The next week, Alldusk spent the lesson making explosions with different chemicals—Cailyn Tyler hung back, covering her ears and wincing at each deafening bang, while the other students crowded forward to get a better look. Every thunderous reaction rocketed off the stone walls, echoing around the tall chamber, until Grindlethorn showed up halfway through the lesson and told Alldusk to keep it down.

  “I’ll go to the headmaster if I hear another explosion,” Grindlethorn said, waving away the cloud of smoke that billowed towards the doorway.

  “Beg pardon,” Alldusk said. “I assumed the stone walls would muffle the noise.”

  “Well, they don’t,” Grindlethorn said irritably. “If you want to blow things up, go down to Delair’s mine. As long as you’re on my floor, I’d like a bit of peace.”

  Grindlethorn stalked away, slamming the classroom door behind him.

  Alldusk shrugged, smiling. “Maybe we should see about soundproofing this room,” he said.

  Tristan and Rusty laughed.

  When Tristan and the other students made their way down to Delair’s first-floor classroom the next day, Tristan paused beside the dark tunnel, wondering if it really was a mine. Delair couldn’t be expected to show up for more than three class days a week, though when he did he punished anyone who was absent. When he was in class, Delair often brought rare rocks and colorful crystal formations to show off—he was much more interested in these rocks than in his subject, which he claimed was purely theoretical anyway.

  “Most books on magic assert that power can be collected from any of the elements,” Delair said. “Unfortunately, we currently only know how to produce magical vapor from the elements of earth and fire. If magicians were once able to use air and water as well, that knowledge is long since forgotten.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tristan noticed Amber shaking her head.

  Even Grindlethorn’s medicine classes were far more interesting than Tristan had expected. The majority of Gracewright’s herbs were used in Grindlethorn’s classes; usually the students spent the hour crushing plants to make poultices and copying down endless uses for each new herb they procured. Grindlethorn also had a habit of calling impromptu class sessions whenever a student came to him for medical attention—after Cassidy and later Cailyn were put through this embarrassing ordeal, Tristan decided he wouldn’t go to the hospital room unless he was dying.

  Easily the most disappointing class proved to be their magic lessons with Professor Brikkens. After the magic show on the first day of school, Tristan had expected more of the same; instead, Brikkens usually spent the period lecturing the students on the dangers of magic. His rambling, roundabout way of talking quickl
y grew exasperating—since his was the first class of the day, Tristan and many of his fellows often spent the hour with their heads pillowed on their arms, drifting off to sleep. Only Rusty attended the class as enthusiastically as ever.

  It came as a surprise, then, when Brikkens announced that he would be giving everyone a chance to try magic.

  At the unexpected announcement, Tristan lifted his head from the desk and blinked up at Brikkens, whose bulk was spilling over the arms of his sturdy chair.

  “Ah, Mr. Fairholm,” Brikkens said happily. Pushing his glasses farther up his stubby nose, he leaned forward and peered at Tristan.

  “Yeah?” Tristan said sleepily. He sat up straighter, smoothing his hair over his face.

  “Brinley Alldusk tells me that you’re rather good at detecting auras. Is this true?”

  Tristan shrugged.

  “Well, come forward,” Brikkens urged. “You will be the first to attempt a rudimentary spell, because out of everyone here, you are the most likely to succeed.”

  Tristan was sure that Amber knew more than him, though he decided not to correct Brikkens. Instead he rose and crossed the room to stand behind the professor. No one was napping now—Leila eyed Tristan with doubtful curiosity, while Zeke sat forward in his chair and smirked.

  Brikkens dug into a pocket of the hideous maroon vest he always wore. Then he grabbed Tristan by the wrist and pressed one of the golden marbles into his hand. Tristan looked in surprise at the marble, cold and metallic against his palm; he had expected something a little more unusual, given that it was spun from pure magic.

  “Now what?” Tristan said. “How am I supposed to use it?” He tried not to look around the room—half of the students wanted him to fail spectacularly, while the others anticipated no better.

  Brikkens cleared his throat. “Well, the key to magic is concentration. To manipulate the power of this orb, you must isolate a single thought from within the complexity of your mind, and use this command to direct the magic. Allow any unnecessary thoughts to intrude, and the spell will be broken—hence, the magic will drain away with no results. Or, if you’re unlucky, the spell could go awry.”